I prefer Hayden White’s position that history is best
approached as literature, assessed for its quality of writing as well as its
consistency with documented evidence.

However, “literature” may also be too general a noun to
address how we approach history.

In introducing Mantel’s book, which is a novel, Wells makes
an important claim:

History has no plot. It happens randomly, goes beyond human
control. People plot, but things go amiss. The desire to capture the past in
unquenchable but fruitless. A historian, whether of recent or long-past events,
tries to tell it how it was, but the attempt is vain. History books have to
have beginnings, middles, and ends. Whether consciously or not, their authors
tell stories from particular perspectives; they choose who and what to write
about; they select from the multifariousness of human experience, imposing
order on randomness, seeing what they choose to see or what their subconscious
minds put before them, setting their stories within a frame of their devising,
revealing subjectivity even as they seek to convey an impression of
objectivity.

Any account of the past requires artistry in the telling,
but those storytellers who proclaim their artifice, melding the stuff of
history with the forms and conventions of art, are more honest about the
illusory nature of their endeavors than those who seek to convey an impression
of impartiality.

That “artistry in the telling” is, of course, narrative
technique. In other words it is the framework of narrative that facilitates
sensemaking: the perception of order in that randomness that is “beyond human
control.” From this point of view, White is less interested in the generality
of the concept of literature than he is in the specificity of the concept of
narrative. To invoke the terminology of Friedrich Hayek, narrative provides the
device that facilitates “sensory order” on what is little more than a random
array of events. However, it is only through that order that those events can
register as memorable, thus establishing history as the literary vehicle of
memory.